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Let me rephrase the question. What purpose does using the article tag serve other than designating it's contents as standalone? Can you set up print.css to print only what's within the article tag? Can you set up rss to transmit only what's in the article tag. Can you designate that mobile devices only see what's in the article tag? What do you do with it once it's there?

It acts exactly the same as a div element, you're supposed to use it to hold things like news articles.

Originally Posted by jwgrafflin

Let me rephrase the question. What purpose does using the article tag serve other than designating it's contents as standalone? Can you set up print.css to print only what's within the article tag? Can you set up rss to transmit only what's in the article tag. Can you designate that mobile devices only see what's in the article tag? What do you do with it once it's there?

It's largely a tag created to help developers make their pages more semantic. Ie, <article> is more semantic than <div>

As to your follow-up, I suspect you're reading more into <article> than is really there. Most of those things can be done in various ways though, but <article> doesn't change anything in particular as to how you'd do them.

Sort of. Once a page is more semantic, you can imagine it would be easier to automate such tasks as "find all the articles in this page" or "raise the search engine priority of a site that has articles on health" or things like that. So there's value in semantic code that wouldn't necessarily be provided by <div id='article'>

The HTML <article> tag is used to represent an article. More specifically, the content within the <article> tag is independent from the other content on the site (even though it could be related). By "independent" I mean that its contents could stand alone.
Example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<article>
<h1>Internet Explorer 9</h1>
<p>Windows Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) was released to
the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT.....</p>
</article>

</body>
</html>
Output:
Windows Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT.....

The HTML <article> tag is used to represent an article. More specifically, the content within the <article> tag is independent from the other content on the site (even though it could be related). By "independent" I mean that its contents could stand alone.
Example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<article>
<h1>Internet Explorer 9</h1>
<p>Windows Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) was released to
the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT.....</p>
</article>

</body>
</html>
Output:
Windows Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT.....